How to Do a Competitor Analysis for&nbspSEO

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Competitive analysis is a key aspect when in the beginning stages of an SEO campaign. Far too often, I see organizations skip this important step and get right into keyword mapping, optimizing content, or link building. But understanding who our competitors are and seeing where they stand can lead to a far more comprehensive understanding of what our goals should be and reveal gaps or blind spots.

By the end of this analysis, you will understand who is winning organic visibility in the industry, what keywords are valuable, and which backlink strategies are working best, all of which can then be utilized to gain and grow your own site’s organic traffic.

Why competitive analysis is important

SEO competitive analysis is critical because it gives data about which tactics are working in the industry we are in and what we will need to do to start improving our keyword rankings. The insights gained from this analysis help us understand which tasks we should prioritize and it shapes the way we build out our campaigns. By seeing where our competitors are strongest and weakest, we can determine how difficult it will be to outperform them and the amount of resources that it will take to do so.

Identify your competitors

The first step in this process is determining who are the top four competitors that we want to use for this analysis. I like to use a mixture of direct business competitors (typically provided by my clients) and online search competitors, which can differ from whom a business identifies as their main competitors. Usually, this discrepancy is due to local business competitors versus those who are paying for online search ads. While your client may be concerned about the similar business down the street, their actual online competitor may be a business from a neighboring town or another state.

To find search competitors, I simply enter my own domain name into SEMrush, scroll down to the “Organic Competitors” section, and click “View Full Report.”

The main metrics I use to help me choose competitors are common keywords and total traffic. Once I've chosen my competitors for analysis, I open up the Google Sheets Competitor Analysis Template to the “Audit Data” tab and fill in the names and URLs of my competitors in rows 2 and 3.

Use the Google Sheets Competitor Analysis Template

A clear, defined process is critical not only for getting repeated results, but to scale efforts as you start doing this for multiple clients. We created our Competitor Analysis Template so that we can follow a strategic process and focus more on analyzing the results rather than figuring out what to look for anew each time.

In the Google Sheets Template, I've provided you with the data points that we'll be collecting, the tools you'll need to do so, and then bucketed the metrics based on similar themes. The data we're trying to collect relates to SEO metrics like domain authority, how much traffic the competition is getting, which keywords are driving that traffic, and the depth of competitors’ backlink profiles. I have built in a few heatmaps for key metrics to help you visualize who's the strongest at a glance.

This template is meant to serve as a base that you can alter depending on your client’s specific needs and which metrics you feel are the most actionable or relevant.

Backlink gap analysis

A backlink gap analysis aims to tell us which websites are linking to our competitors, but not to us. This is vital data because it allows us to close the gap between our competitors’ backlink profiles and start boosting our own ranking authority by getting links from websites that already link to competitors. Websites that link to multiple competitors (especially when it is more than three competitors) have a much higher success rate for us when we start reaching out to them and creating content for guest posts.

In order to generate this report, you need to head over to the Moz Link Explorer tool and input the first competitor’s domain name. Next, click “Linking Domains” on the left side navigation and then click “Request CSV” to get the needed data.

Next, head to the SEO Competitor Analysis Template, select the “Backlink Import - Competitor 1” tab, and paste in the content of the CSV file. It should look like this:

Repeat this process for competitors 2–4 and then for your own website in the corresponding tabs marked in red.

Once you have all your data in the correct import tabs, the “Backlink Gap Analysis” report tab will populate. The result is a highly actionable report that shows where your competitors are getting their backlinks from, which ones they share in common, and which ones you don’t currently have.

It’s also a good practice to hide all of the “Import” tabs marked in red after you paste the data into them, so the final report has a cleaner look. To do this, just right-click on the tabs and select “Hide Sheet,” so the report only shows the tabs marked in blue and green.

For our clients, we typically gain a few backlinks at the beginning of an SEO campaign just from this data alone. It also serves as a long-term guide for link building in the months to come as getting links from high-authority sites takes time and resources. The main benefit is that we have a starting point full of low-hanging fruit from which to base our initial outreach.

Keyword gap analysis

Keyword gap analysis is the process of determining which keywords your competitors rank well for that your own website does not. From there, we reverse-engineer why the competition is ranking well and then look at how we can also rank for those keywords. Often, it could be reworking metadata, adjusting site architecture, revamping an existing piece of content, creating a brand-new piece of content specific to a theme of keywords, or building links to your content containing these desirable keywords.

To create this report, a similar process as the backlink gap analysis one is followed; only the data source changes. Go to SEMrush again and input your first competitor’s domain name. Then, click on the “Organic Research” positions report in the left-side navigation menu and click on "Export" on the right.

Once you download the CSV file, paste the content into the “Keyword Import - Competitor 1” tab and then repeat the process for competitors 2–4 and your own website.

The final report will now populate on the “Keyword Gap Analysis” tab marked in green. It should look like the one below:

This data gives us a starting point to build out complex keyword mapping strategy documents that set the tone for our client campaigns. Rather than just starting keyword research by guessing what we think is relevant, we have hundreds of keywords to start with that we know are relevant to the industry. Our keyword research process then aims to dive deeper into these topics to determine the type of content needed to rank well.

This report also helps drive our editorial calendar, since we often find keywords and topics where we need to create new content to compete with our competitors. We take this a step further during our content planning process, analyzing the content the competitors have created that is already ranking well and using that as a base to figure out how we can do it better. We try to take some of the best ideas from all of the competitors ranking well to then make a more complete resource on the topic.

Using key insights from the audit to drive your SEO strategy

It is critically important to not just create this report, but also to start taking action based on the data that you have collected. On the first tab of the spreadsheet template, we write in insights from our analysis and then use those insights to drive our campaign strategy.

Some examples of typical insights from this document would be the average number of referring domains that our competitors have and how that relates to our own backlink profile. If we are ahead of our competitors regarding backlinks, content creation might be the focal point of the campaign. If we are behind our competitors in regards to backlinks, we know that we need to start a link building campaign as soon as possible.

Another insight we gain is which competitors are most aggressive in PPC and which keywords they are bidding on. Often, the keywords that they are bidding on have high commercial intent and would be great keywords to target organically and provide a lift to our conversions.

Start implementing competitive analyses into your workflow

Competitive analyses for SEO are not something that should be overlooked when planning a digital marketing strategy. This process can help you strategically build unique and complex SEO campaigns based on readily available data and the demand of your market. This analysis will instantly put you ahead of competitors who are following cookie-cutter SEO programs and not diving deep into their industry. Start implementing this process as soon as you can and adjust it based on what is important to your own business or client’s business.

Editor's note: Please note that this template may not be updated in the future. If you happen to require a change to the Google Sheets template, we recommend crowdsourcing an answer in the community Q&A or sharing your success stories with us and the community on Twitter!

Gap Analysis is extremely important to start with. When it comes to competitive analysis you first of all want to know what is that a large group of your competitors have that you simply don't. Often, you see pages that your competitors rank well for that you didn't even think you need to create!

I have to admit that when it comes to a backlink analysis I prefer to rely on multiple sources and not just one, so Moz is one but also Ahrefs or Majestic. And when it comes to Keywords then SEMRush but also SimilarWeb.

SimilarWeb by the way is doing a fantastic job with their compare mode, where you can easily visualize your keywords against 4 different competitors. Not to mention the breakdown by country.

And the gap analysis also exists for other channels besides SEO, such as Referrals when a few of your competitors are getting traffic from sites that you don't, or Social media where multiple competitors enjoy traffic from a network you're not even on, or a specific twitter account you should pay attention to.

Last thing, even when it comes to SEO audits specifically, I also like to compare metrics such as Sessions/User, Time on site, Bounce Rate, and Pages/visit with the same competitors. These metrics are all huge for SEO and in my opinion should be discussed with the clients from a Product point of view when starting an SEO Campaign.

Great insight here. This template is meant to serve as a base for further customization. Feel free to build on top of it with metrics and data that you find useful, I would love to see what you come up with. You can actually configure the backlink gap analysis to run for majestic or ahrefs by adjusting the query formula slightly. You bring up a great point about analyzing link data from multiple sources to get a more accurate picture so I would definitely recommend exploring majestic and ahrefs data as well..

Thanks John, really great template for competetive analyses. I think this is fundemental for any effective SEO campaign as without it, you could easily be concentrating on wrong area.. E.g. Linkbuilding while you already outperform your competitores, content when all your competitores have much stronger backlink profiles etc...

For backlinks analysis we do use a much bigger sample of competitores. This will give you even richer information. And we will extend this to other backlink sources.

Thanks Ramon! You can easily add more tabs to input more backlink data for additional competitors and then adjust the query formula to use the new tabs. I often increase this to 10, 15 or even 20 competitors for larger clients. The beauty of Google Sheets templates is the ease in which you can make these adjustments. Let me know if you need any help with that.

Great tips for competitor analysis John! Although I love using SEMrush, Moz Pro, and Ahrefs the most, some free tools that have helped me throughout the years and may be good for someone who doesn't have subscriptions to these SEO Tools are SEOQuake, SpyFu, and WooRank.

I do recommend getting access to SEMrush, Moz Pro, and/or Ahrefs as soon as you can though, and maybe use multiple tools as they often uncover different data from each other, especially on BackLink Analysis.

Agreed Nick. A compilation of different data sources will give the clearest picture of a competitor's backlinks. Although, I think it is just as important to have a clear process to filter & go after the newly discovered backlinks; That is where I think the provided spreadsheet provides a lot of value.

SemRush has a feature in Beta right now which automatically compiles that list for you to wade through and sort based on the competitors you input into the project. I highly suggest you check it out!

Analyzing the competition is fundamental to know the SEO strategy to carry out and to discover the weaknesses of the competitors, in addition to being able to use strategies that are working to the competition.

It is always valuable to see how different SEOs go about analyzing the competition and creating a strategy based on data, not on gut feeling. I know that there are new features being rolled out with Moz pro; I am curious to see how some of these steps can be automated.

Thanks for sharing your template file. It will help focussing on the right things right from the beginning. I checked out SEMrush to get a comparison of the keywords our competition is using. The results are poor basically. Its about sites in Switzerland for keywords and competitors we know since years. The data these tools show you is not at all reflecting the actual situtation here. I guess they perform well in the US/Canada, by far less good in rest of the world...

@Cesare: I agree with
your point. That is why I’ve used Sistrix instead of Semrush data. There was
need to adapt the sheet a bit. In my opinion Sistrix works great for the whole european market (I am also working in Zurich/Switzerland by the way).

On the Backlink Gap Analysis tab I'd like to be able to view data so I can see where competitors have backlinks that we don't. If Yes is the value, then I don't want that see information.

Is this adjustment to the formula possible? Or, because of the nature of the way the page is setup, do I need the two data points minimum? If it's the latter, what adjustments can I make to get the data I'm looking for? I'm trying to reverse engineer it here and it isn't working.

Great question. You could adjust the formulas but I find it easier to highlight the full report (after it is populated with your data) then copy it and paste "values only" this way none of the formulas break. Then go into the navigation of google sheets and select "Data" then "Filter". You will now have filtering options on all of the headings. Then you can simple select your website and uncheck "Yes" so you only see the domains that do not link to you. Give that a shot and let me know if it works for you.

When I hand this off to clients I always copy each report and paste values only. This way the sheet is faster and there is no risk of the client accidently breaking something.

Maybe it's the way I'm entering the data, but I'm only getting about 10 rows of results on the sheet, where there is a minimum of two Yes matches. So I'm not able to see where there is only one Yes, and it's on a competitor.

Thank you so much for building out such a great SEO template. This post came at the perfect time for me, I've been looking for a template that does exactly this. I'm already reaching out to new competitor link prospects!

I'm wondering what your advice would be in the event that a competitor site hasn't yet been indexed by Moz. I was thinking of just swapping in a comparable metric from Majestic or Ahrefs so I could include the competitor in the same sheet, but it would be good to hear your advice.

That would work but I would prefer to keep the data consistent and use Majestic or Ahrefs instead in that case. The template formulas can be adjusted to work with either tool. Sometimes, I will combine the data from all 3 tools to increase the amount of backlinks in the analysis but that takes a little bit more work and formatting to get it to work properly.

Maybe the next step with this tool is to add additonal options for Majestic and ahrefs so it combines the data from all 3 automatically.

Yes, that sounds like it would be awesome. Another great update would be to add a script that populates the spreadsheet automatically from a file structure containing the downloads (organic KWs and Links) to save copying and pasting everything. I’m going to have a chat with a friend in the Analytics space to see if he can help. Will share any successful output.

P.S. For anyone planning to analyse 10+ competitors - I got stuck with the 2,000,000 google sheet cell limit so had to split in two (which took a lot of faffing around). Advise splitting KWs and Links into two spreadsheets at the get go if you’re planning to analyse this many.

That would be a great addition indeed, anything to help automate the data collection would be great. Let me know if you are able to figure it out an do share! Great point about breaking up the keyword and backlink tools into separate sheets for larger analysis as Google sheets will crash with too much data.

Really enjoying the template! How can I extend the data pull range in the Audit Data tab? When I add additional competitor columns and create Backlink and Keyword Import tabs for each new column, the data doesn't populate in their respective Analysis tabs.

Great blog post and very helpful. However, I downloaded this Googlesheet and completed it via excel. However, the queries and connections aren't working. Is this resource only available to be used via Googlesheets?

The Query function that my template uses is unique to google sheets so this tool won't work with excel. I would recommend performing the analysis in Google Sheets and then copy and pasting the results into excel if you have to use excel for whatever reason.

Great Article! Just curious, the spreadsheet seems very similar to the new gap analysis tool in SEM Rush. Are there benefits to your spreadsheet in providing information that this tool does not? Just curious.

Yes there are a few benefits to using the sheet instead of working out of the software. If you are working with clients you can pass this spreadsheet off as a deliverable as it already has all of the formatting enabled. I am able to efficiently produce high quality competitive analysis reports for my clients with this template.

If you don't work with clients the next benefit is that you can configure this tool to work with majestic or ahref data as well. Moz, Majestic, and Ahrefs have much better backlink data than SEMrush (IMO) does right now so you get a more complete picture using this spreadsheet tool.

I am also not a big fan of working out of software as spreadsheets provide a lot of flexibility to analyze data more efficiently for me.

SEMrush is a great tool though and I will use their keyword gap occasionally if I am not producing a client report.

Hello John. I would like to thank you and congratulate you for sharing this information with us. I am starting to learn this kind of things and to read this articles, really well written and understandable for normal people like me it's really important.

Hi Shashixx, there are some free or semi free tools out there. Some only free trial some free with some kind of limitation. smallseotools.com is one like that. You get maximum of 100 backlinks (but then again its free). You should also remember though that you get what you pay for. All these paid tools have lots of additional information or features that are valuable for improving on your seo. At the end i´d say they are worth their investment.

I appreciate that, thank you for checking this out. Let me know if you have any questions once you start using the sheet template. Once you use the backlink gap analysis and keyword gap analysis tabs once or twice it becomes a lot easier and more efficient to use.

I am trying to fill all metrics using Moz pro and Semrush(free) but can you point me where to find:a) Top 5 websites that link the most and b) Number of referring domains? For the latter I am guessing it is Open Site Explorer > Compare Link Metrics > Root domain metrics > Total number of Root domains but I am not 100% sure...

This is really helpful, i just find out the list of top 3 competitors and follow the same backlinks process for my site as well. But here i found some new tips of keyword gap analysis for competitive analysis. Thank you so much for sharing i will follow all your step to do new competitive analysis for my client and try to improve my ranking on most competitive keyword top realtor for Fastexpert.com. Thank you once again.

Dear Moz, This is not aimed at the author but Moz Directly! I really don't understand Moz it's meant to be a SEO website, but seriously you guys suck at UX for one thing. Can you sort out the huge gapping in your articles on a Desktop computer? I will even give you the code needed to edit your website:

Hey there sally_lin! :) Thanks for letting us know something's not quite right; I'd recommend shooting an email to our friendly Help Team at help@moz.com so they can investigate. If it's possible to include a screenshot of what you're seeing, that's really helpful, too. Thanks again!

Exactly. This is really meant to be the start of an end to end competitive analysis report that you can pass of to your clients or internal teams. I often get great feedback from clients when they see the depth of the analysis that was perofrmed. The next step from there is to start going through the data and taking action.

Using SEMrush is definitely the great and fastest way to Analyze the Competitor site. It's explores easy and every aspect from organic searched keywords and also view from where they got links from for any of their posts. This can simplify your content strategy and move forward..

As said, analyzing Competitor is the key factor, which should be done by any website owner. Thanks for the awesome one!

That goes a bit beyond the scope of this article but I would recommend reading all of the seo guides in the Moz Learning Center: https://moz.com/learn/seo. Once you do that you will have a good base for understanding indexation and link building tactics.